Monday Links from the Bench vol. DCLXXVI

[DoctorStrangelove]

Indeed. Nice to see Maurice Wilkes referenced from 1951 for the invention of microcode.

Figuring this stuff out from die photos blows one's (and zero's) mind. .

Reminding me that the 8" floppy diskette was invented to load the microcode into an IBM computer back in 1971.

Interesting that the programmer's model is unrelated to the actual hardware. .

Asteroid Launcher?

Wasn't that Zeity chap working on a Mass Driver of some kind?

Devastation without the radiation type of thing. .

[northernladuk]

I[*]How the 8086 processor's microcode engine works - Ken Shirriff with more good stuff: ”I've been reverse-engineering the 8086 from die photos and this blog post discusses how the chip's microcode engine operated… I'll look at how the 8086 decides what microcode to run, steps through the microcode, handles jumps and calls inside the microcode, and physically stores the microcode. It was a challenge to fit the microcode onto the chip with 1978 technology, so Intel used many optimization techniques.”

I did an HNC in electronics as an apprentice and had an interest in it as a kid so have a bit of knowledge of the terminology but apart from recognising the words it's all goobledegook to me. Still amazing how clever this stuff is. How they designed all that in 1978 blows my mind. Must have been some super smart people working on all that.

To be clever enough to find this interesting to do as a side hobby is just something else.

[NickFitz]

It's been snowing here this morning which makes shifting heavy stuff over to my new flat a rather dubious proposition, as I doubt anybody's gritted the private road that runs round the square. Oh well, at least the Internet has plenty of stuff to read instead

• A Matter of Honor - ”Why were three Afghan women brutally murdered at the edge of Europe? A journey from Mazar-i-Sharif to Istanbul to Athens in search of answers.”
• Curved spacetime in the lab - Make your own Universe: ”In a laboratory experiment, researchers from Heidelberg University have succeeded in realising an effective spacetime that can be manipulated. In their research on ultracold quantum gases, they were able to simulate an entire family of curved universes to investigate different cosmological scenarios and compare them with the predictions of a quantum field theoretical model.”
• The Miraculous Search-and-Rescue of a Lost Child - ”As storms raged, a four-year-old boy from Asa went missing in the surrounding wilderness. While ground teams tried to track his tiny footprints, our fixed-wing pilot supported the search party from the air. One lost night stretched into several, and it seemed increasingly impossible that the child would be found alive in such a vast, unforgiving landscape. But then, on the sixth day, a miracle happened.”
• Every “chronically online” conversation is the same - Rebecca Jennings on the problem of social media conversations: ”It’s become something of a sport to unearth these sorts of replies, the ones where strangers make willfully decontextualized moral judgments on other people’s lives… The compilation below includes a disabled woman being accused of elitism for using a grocery delivery service and a 21-year-old Redditor being accused of ‘grooming’ her 20-year-old boyfriend.”
• Asteroid Launcher - HT to veteran for this fun tool: set the size, velocity, and angle of your asteroid, pick a spot on the map, and launch! It then gives you loads of interesting information about the ensuing devastation. And it’s actual science too: ”The simulation is based on papers by Dr. Gareth Collins and Dr. Clemens Rumpf.”
• The secret lives of MI6’s top female spies - ”I do not know where I am going and have only been instructed to meet my contact at a central London landmark. We travel by car, boat and train to a place where officers of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, the overseas espionage agency known as SIS, learn their craft. I am not allowed to describe it to you, but I can tell you this: it is giant and austere and the slicing wind makes my eyes water.” So begins Helen Warrell’s journey to meet the women who have risen high in the ranks of the UK’s spy agency
• The Fascinating History Behind A Set Of Miniature Murder Scenes - ”Forensics pioneer and miniaturist Frances Glessner Lee crafted tiny and macabre dioramas in the 1940s to teach investigators to search for clues and assess a scene.” I linked to a piece about these crime scene dioramas back in 2014, but this article has an interesting approach to exploring them
• Mince Pie Megatest 2022 - The people who make the Raspberry Pi focus on something even more important: ”We apply our demanding testing principles to the latest festive pastry treats to find this year’s top mince pie.”
• How the 8086 processor's microcode engine works - Ken Shirriff with more good stuff: ”I've been reverse-engineering the 8086 from die photos and this blog post discusses how the chip's microcode engine operated… I'll look at how the 8086 decides what microcode to run, steps through the microcode, handles jumps and calls inside the microcode, and physically stores the microcode. It was a challenge to fit the microcode onto the chip with 1978 technology, so Intel used many optimization techniques.”
• An Interview With The Mosaic Artist Who’s Quietly Filling Sidewalk Cracks in Fairmount - ”If you look carefully in the sidewalks on that street and a few others in the neighborhood, you’ll see other mosaic interventions that fill sidewalk cracks and holes left by missing bricks. Both delightful and functional, they exemplify some of the best things that street art can accomplish. But who made them?” An anonymous artist brightens up a Philadelphia neighbourhood
  
  

Happy invoicing!